Reggae: Past, Present and Future

Call me a slacker. Call me forgetful. I did it again: skipped another Planning Commission meeting discussion of the Reggae permit. Truth is I've been working a lot the last few days and when my wife asked if I wanted to go to the movies, I just plain forgot about Reggae and said yes. We went to see a great film called Away From Her, with a luminous Julie Christie as a woman whose mind is drifting into Alzheimer's. I had made mental plans to TiVo the meeting, but I forgot.

That said, I'm left with a couple of sources for reports on what happened. Eric's blog has another "open thread" -- a dangerous prospect at best -- where 27 anonymous commenters (so far) have offered various biased takes on the proceedings and/or outright lies: from "Carol and Tom surprised everyone by announcing the cancellation of Reggae Rising..." to "The Mateel lost...again" and on to variations on the tired Carol-is-a-bad-person-who-stole-our-show theme. One anon echoed my own opinion that "this spinning is starting to get to me..."

A couple of people hinted at what the commissioners actually did, which was pretty much what I'd guessed they'd do. They put off the final decision on the permit to another day. At least that's what I gleaned from James Faulk's story in the Times Standard. As James reports, the commissioners refused the Mateel's request to pull the permit and shut down Reggae Rising and ultimately put things in the hands of Kirk Girard, whose title, "Community Development Services Director," makes him head of planning staff. (BTW, that's Kirk on the front page in the little head shot labeled Dimmick.)

When I went to the Summer Arts Fest over the weekend I talked with a few people about where things are at and where they are going. When I asked, "What's up with Reggae?" Mateel board member Bob Stern told me, "They're going to try to put on a festival; we're going to try to stop them." He laid out the Mateel's position: that the planning commission had to see that the permit belongs to the Mateel -- he figures the law is on their side and what's right is right.

Here's what I think, and please do not assume that I've "drunk the Kool-Aid," something I heard once again at Summer Arts. From the first planning commish hearing onward, the commissioners have said that they do not want to get in the middle of the battle over Reggae, they did not and do not want to decide which side gets to do the festival based on contract issues -- they left that to the courts -- and they said flat out they do not want to get in the middle of the dogfight over the permit. They are not going to be the ones to take Reggae away from Carol.

Without getting into the question of who's right and who's wrong -- if you're reading this page, chances are you've already made up your mind which side you are on -- I'll offer my humble opinion as to why right and wrong don't matter in one word: Money.

As I told Bob at Summer Art, government officials, be they planning commissioners or supervisors or whatever, are more concerned about money than they are about the law or about right and wrong. And when it comes to Reggae, we're talking about a lot of money, not just the millions that come in for tickets, beer and T-shirts and not the tens of thousands earned by various nonprofits, the uncounted millions that are spent in Humboldt by people coming here for the festival: motels fill up, grocery stores and gasoline stations do more business, people come here to buy all sorts of things -- they spend money. I'm not saying that the commissioners are going to get any of this money -- but they serve the Humboldt County public in general, and a lot of people stand to lose income if Reggae does not happen.

James quotes Commissioner Emad who said, "I'd just hate to see this thing die." Why? Because he's looking at the bottom line for the county as a whole. No one wants to see all that money go away. There's a reason why they call it "the almighty dollar."

Okay, James (Brown) says he's "ready to to do my thing," and "stay on the scene" on another beautiful day in paradise -- we'll see which war they talk about this week...